Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

The Worst of Times, the Best of Times

By Alan
Caruba

I suppose
that throughout history men and women have asked themselves if they were living
through either the worst or best of times. The times between wars are most
surely the best of times and the times leading up to and during a war qualify
as the worst.They are, however, rather
quickly forgotten. It only takes about two generations—sometimes less—to move
on from such events.

May 8, is
“VE Day” celebrating the U.S. victory in Europe in World War Two. I suspect
that most of our younger generations, including some of the Boomers, have no
idea what the “VE” stands for.

World War
Two ended seven decades ago, but not only have most Americans moved on from the
horror of September 11, 2001, but it would appear that even the killing of an
American ambassador and three security personnel in Benghazi, Libya on
September 11, 2012 doesn’t arouse much anger even as we learn of a White House
cover-up that utterly debases their sacrifice and loss. “Dude, that was two
years ago,” said one White House staff member; as crass and crude a dismissal
as one can imagine.

From a
perspective of more than seventy and a half years, my mind flashes back to the
Watergate scandal that began in June 1972 and concluded with President Nixon’s
resignation in August 1974. That was a long two years as the attending events
unfolded.

Forty-three
people in the Nixon administration went to jail for their participation in the
cover-up. The current Attorney General received a Contempt of Congress citation
for his failure to provide information about one of the administration’s many
scandals and during a recent speech to the National Action Network, a group founded
by Rev. Al Sharpton, asked “What Attorney General has ever had to deal with
that kind of treatment?” Does the name John Mitchell ring a bell? He was
Nixon’s Attorney General.

Holder
apparently believes that the charges hurled at him and President Obama are
mostly based on the color of their skin. We live in a nation that has a black
President, a black Attorney General, and a black member of the Supreme Court,
to name just a few Afro-Americans who have made it to the topmost circles of
power. There are 43 black members of the House and one in the Senate. I grew up
in a nation where blacks could not eat in certain restaurants, get a room at a
hotel, and even had separate drinking fountains. I witnessed the Civil Rights
era and these, for black Americans, are the best of times in the long history
of our nation.

For nearly
all Americans, however, these are far from the best of times. In 1981 President
Reagan pulled the nation out of a recession and set it on a path of prosperity
that lasted well in the Clinton years. A financial crisis occurred in the last
year of President Bush’s second term. If President Obama didn’t want to
“inherit” that, he should not have run for office, but he spent his entire
first term blaming the economy and everything else on Bush to the point where
he made himself look foolish. And then he was reelected!

We are now
two years into Obama’s second term and failed economic and national security
policies that include the shrinking of our military power to the levels of
pre-World War Two years. Domestic policies are having their effect on failed
foreign policies. There are some 90 million Americans out of work or who ceased to look for it.

Peace,
some say, is the period between wars and there is great truth in that. Most of
my life was spent in the last century, starting in the latter years of the
1930s. There were thirty-two wars, large and small, somewhere in the world
during the last century, including a Cold War from 1945 to 1991 between the
U.S. and the then-Soviet Union.

So far as
the U.S. was concerned, our military saw action in World War One (1914-1918),
World War Two (begun in 1939, we entered in 1941-1945), the Korean War (1950-1953),
the Vietnam War (begun in 1959 with initial U.S. participation in 1961. We
would abandon the conflict in 1973). In 1990 the U.S. led the Persian Gulf War
to drive Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. We would invade Iraq in 2003 to
depose Hussein. In the wake of the 9/11/2001 attack, our forces were dispatched
to Afghanistan and are in the process of withdrawing.

War is the
way nations tend to settle their differences. Despite the creation of the
United Nations after World War Two ended, the U.S. has been engaged in wars and
their deterrence. The rest of the world during the last century pursued wars in
places that included Mexico, Russia, China, Spain and the rest of Europe, the
French Indochina War, the French-Algerian War, the Soviet-Afghan War, the
Iran-Iraq War, the third Balkan War, the Rwandan genocide, and the wars that
Israel has endured over the more than sixty years of its existence.

This is
why many are inclined to think, not only in terms of the U.S. economy, but in
response to events beyond our borders—once again in Europe—that the conflict in
the Ukraine may metastasize into World War Three if NATO is forced to confront
a Russia behaving like it did before its former government collapsed.

I would,
however, suggest that the greatest threat of war is staring the entire world in
the face and that is an Iran with nuclear weapons.

We have a
President who has displayed virtually no knowledge, nor understanding of the
history briefly detailed here. Instead, he has pursued a deal with an Iran that
has hated the U.S. (and Israel) as the heart of its foreign policy since 1979,
As one former senior intelligence official was recently quoted as saying, “The
fear is that the Iranians are going to pretend to give up their nuclear weapons
program—and we are going to pretend to believe them.”

The only
outcome of that would be an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities by Israel for
whom a nuclear Iran would be a second Holocaust. Israel destroyed a nuclear
reactor in Iraq in 1981 and in Syria in 2007.

In a
broader context, we and the rest of the world are living in an era in which
Islam is challenging Western, modern civilization with precepts that embrace
beheading, amputation, stoning to death, and other forms of violence, often
against women, that must be confronted and defeated.

So, if
these are best of times, they could rapidly turn into the worst of times…again.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.